Russia attacked Kyiv overnight into 8 September with ballistic, cruise, and anti-ship missiles and jet-powered drones, killing two people and injuring ten, Ukrainian local authorities and the Air Force reported. Ukraine's foreign minister says Moscow launched it the moment the US peace envoys left the capital, and the country's president says the weapons were combined deliberately to cause the greatest possible harm to life. Strikes the same night reached six other regions.

The strike came as the pause expired

US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner made their first visit to Kyiv on 6 September. Ukraine halted strikes on Moscow for three days around the trip, while the Kremlin said its pause on Kyiv ran only to Monday. Nothing else stopped, and Ukraine logged impacts at 11 sites while the delegation was in Moscow.

Russia launched another massive attack on Kyiv the moment the envoys left, damaging residential areas and killing at least two people, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said.

"[Russian President Putin's] ballistic missiles speak louder than his words on diplomacy. Strike after strike on residential buildings brings him no closer to winning this war—it is nothing but senseless terror," the minister wrote.

Russian forces resumed strikes on the capital after a three-day break tied to the American visit, RFE/RL's Belarus service reported.

What Russia launched

The attack ran from 18:00 on 7 September through the night, the Ukrainian Air Force reported, without giving the total number of launched ballistics. 

Russia fired Oniks anti-ship missiles, ballistic Iskander-M, S-400, and KN-23 missiles, and 32 Kh-101 cruise missiles from four of its regions and occupied Crimea, along with 166 Shahed-type drones, more than half of them jet-powered, and decoys launched from two Russian regions and occupied territory. Air defense downed or suppressed 175 targets by 08:30: two ballistic missiles, 31 cruise missiles, and 142 drones. Kyiv Oblast and Odesa Oblast were the main axes.

"It was a hard attack, which the Russians deliberately tried to calculate for the greatest possible harm to life," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Explore further

Ukraine put its own peace proposals on the table as two US envoys reached Kyiv for the first time

Results against cruise missiles were very good, he said, while ballistics remain especially hard, and Ukraine proves that need for interceptors to its partners every day. He said he had already discussed it with the Americans and Europeans and would meet states and companies the same day about supplies and about Ukraine's FREYJA anti-ballistic system.

Ukraine has 67 companies working on interceptors, three to five with real results. 

Two dead and 13 rescued in the capital

First explosions in Kyiv came at 03:30. Fires and damage reached at least 16 locations in five districts, the Kyiv Military Administration reported. Warehouses, garages, and cars burned, fire spread from a garage to a business center, and a strike on a 26-story non-residential building wrecked structures at the 23rd floor, the State Emergency Service said. Ten people were freed from a blocked five-story block, the service said, and rescuers saved 13 in all, according to Zelenskyy. Morning drone attacks added a warehouse fire, the city said, and the night's damage forced it to reroute a series of bus, tram, and trolleybus lines.

Beyond Kyiv

Two Russian drones hit the locomotive of the Kyiv–Sumy train in the morning, which a monitoring team had stopped in time to evacuate passengers and crew without casualties, Ukrainian Railways board chairman Oleksandr Pertsovskyi said.

Outside Odesa the strike damaged pavilions at the 7th Kilometer market, the country's largest wholesale market for non-food goods, and hospitalized its 58-year-old guard, oblast head Oleh Kiper said. 

In Kharkiv two people were injured, one of them a 17-year-old, and Russian forces most often target energy sites, according to oblast head Oleh Syniehubov, who said they struck settlements across the oblast almost 800 times last week alone.

Zelenskyy said Kyiv Oblast's critical infrastructure, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk Oblast were also hit.